Tuesdays with Dorie: Black-and-White-Chocolate Cake

Like probably a lot of you, I have a bookshelf dedicated to my cookbooks. I read them, I admire them, I love and cherish them…but apart from a couple of standards, I don’t really use them that often. Over the holidays, I finally got Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours. I felt like the last person on Earth to get it…I wondered if anyone noticed the big “L” stamped on my forehead for the past year! From what I’ve heard, it’s a fabulous book, so I would also be a total loser if I didn’t put it to use. But I need a little peer pressure sometimes, so help cattle prod me, I just joined a really great group called Tuesdays with Dorie! The brainchild of Laurie from quirky cupcake, TWD makes one recipe a week out of Baking from My Home to Yours. It’ll take awhile, but we hope to get through the whole thing! This means that at some point I will also need to get around to baking the first five recipes that I missed out on. I’m hoping none of this is too ambitious on my part…

For my first TWD, the group is making Dorie’s Black-and-White-Chocolate Cake, a recipe chosen by April of Abbey Sweets. It’s a vanilla buttermilk cake, layered with dark chocolate pastry cream and white chocolate whipped cream. Then the whole thing gets frosted with more white chocolate whipped cream. I love me some cake, so I was pretty psyched to get this one going.

OK, if you have the book and look on page 260, you’ll probably notice that my cake doesn’t look a whole lot like Dorie’s from the outside. In fact, it looks like crap. I had some big-time filling and frosting issues…it was highly upsetting, and I almost didn’t want to post a photo. I found the white chocolate whipped cream too soft to spread on the side of the cake (I couldn’t whip it anymore, because it was beginning to look separated, and I actually had to make it twice because the first time it really did curdle and wouldn’t come back together no matter how I tried to save it). It just slid right off and mucked up the cake plate…in hindsight, I should have realized that would happen and just iced the top, leaving the side exposed for an old-fashioned look. Since the dark chocolate pastry cream was oozing out between the layers anyway, I put some that I had leftover into the freezer for half and hour and tried to use it to frost the side instead. Because of it’s consistency, I couldn’t get a nice frost with that either (that’s why no one frosts with pastry cream!), but had to settle for more of a thin smear…grrrrr. I had made some tempered chocolate curls before beginning this whole process, so I hoped they would distract the eye from my frosting failures.

Thank goodness that the inside of my cake looks more or less normal. Oh, by the way, I halved the recipe in the book so I’d just have a six-inch cake. I have have to say, the dark chocolate cream was damn good…a perfect chocolate pastry cream. The cake itself was a little dense, I thought, but this could very well be due to differences in flour (I have had a couple of baked goods come out funky using my US books and Aussie flour).

Because of the problems I had, I’m really interested to see how my fellow TWD members did with this recipe. I’m going over to the Tuesdays with Dorie blog that Laurie set up to see the list of TWD bakers and visit their sites. So should you! And if you want to try your hand at the cake, take a look here on Abbey Sweets for the recipe.

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Steph, your frosting job looks absolutely exquisite! I would have never guessed that you had problems – it looks perfect! I too had trouble with whipping my cream and my post includes a link to video from Epicurious that demonstrates the different stages of whipped cream. Maybe it would help you as it did me!

Ok, so you’re not the LAST person on earth to get Dorie Greenspan’s cookbook…..that would be me! I’ve got it on my wish list, and I’m dropping hints left and right to my husband that it would be a good Valentine’s gift. I’ve been admiring the Tuesdays with Dorie baking group from afar, and as soon as I can get my hands on that cookbook, I’d love to join. Your cake looks really amazing to me, and those chocolate curls on top are fantastic.

wow! i don’t know what you are talking about, because your cake looks amazing! i had similar problems w/the white cream, but i think that was due to refrigeration issues. great job and glad to have you join us🙂 (btw – i only got my book this christmas, too!)

Thanks for all the nice comments! I am still bummed about my cream not coming out…maybe I’ll try again sometime.

jyothi–Actually, both Coles and Woolies do sell cake flour. It’s a relatively new product here, I think. It’s from a brand called Anchor Foods and it comes in a 1 kg box. You can find it near the other regular flours. They also sell SR cake flour and bread flour.

I must say that either the chocolate curls where overwhelmingly beautiful or your cake as a whole is perfect, because my first reaction was that it was stunning! I never would’ve known you had any issues with the frosting if you hadn’t said something. I can only dream of having a cake turn out that beautiful!

What are you talking about, your cake turned out so gorgeous!! I didn’t have a chance to make this last week and I keep thinking I should really make an excuse because it sounds and looks so good. I love the decoration on the top of the cake too.

Your chocolate curls on top are so stunning.
In regards to your flour questions I found the following websites really helpful. Rose Levy Beranbaum explains why such poor results occur when American cake flour is called for and unbleached flour is used. If you search this website there is also a really interesting lecture video on flour.http://www.realbakingwithrose.com/2006/07/crossing_the_atlantic_by_cookb.html

Win–If you know how to temper chocolate, then it’s pretty easy. Tempering is something I’ve learned to do by feel, so unfortunately, I can’t really explain that bit. But, you take tempered chocolate, spread it out with an offset spatula over a piece of acetate (while in Australia, I bought acetate from either a restaurant supply store of a craft store). You can use baking parchment in place of acetate, but your curls won’t be super-shiny. You want to spread a layer that’s fairly thin, but that will be strong enough to not fall apart when you do the curls. Let the chocolate get to the point where it’s just beginning to set up on the acetate, but is still pliable. Then, using the back of a knife, cut in long gently waving lines that will form the curls. Roll the sheet up into a loose roll, or wrap around a rolling pin or something. Then pop in the fridge for about an hour, until the chocolate is very well set and releases from the acetate. Remove the acetate carefully, and the chocoate will break apart along those lines you cut…you will have your curls. Hope this helps…e-mail me if you have more questions!